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Anna's Grammar Pointers #1
I had one really great English teacher in high school and several excellent professors in college, all of whom drove home the importance of proper grammar and punctuation. I’m so lucky to get the chance to work with authors who put together amazing stories that are, for the most part (like… 98.5%) really well written. I don’t have to do a lot of ‘heavy lifting’ when it comes to editing; I’m able to focus mainly on punctuation and issues of clarity. I hope our authors won’t mind me saying this, but as good as they are with words, I add and remove a LOT of commas. I make a LOT of tiny little changes to things that appear, I presume, because not everybody had those teachers and professors that made prescriptive grammar a priority.
So I’m going to write a series of posts here with pointers on the errors I see most frequently. Not just to make my life easier, should any of our authors take these tips to heart, but because the world is just a prettier place with proper punctuation. (But alliteration sort of gets on one’s nerves.)
The best place to start is the error I see most often: commas missing from compound sentences – and commas used to splice sentences that are NOT compound.
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Cover delights
Ian Hocking is the author of Deja Vu*, and has just published his latest book, Flashback. I mention it because I did the cover art for it, and what's a girl to do on a Sunday afternoon if not parp her own trumpet a bit?
I do cover art for other publishers, amongst other things, under the Snowangels consultancy arm of Snowbooks. Shout if you want to talk to me about that sort of thing.
* I tried to get the e acutes and graves to work but, well, gave up. You know how to pronounce it, anyway. Not 'dedger'.
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Countdown
Not the Carol Vorderman thing, oh no. It's the countdown to the publication of Write to be Published, launched on author Nicola Morgan's website this weekend. Aside from it just being a crucial blog in itself, which you should see for your general enjoyment and development, there's a competition for writers and a handy taster doc. Git yoursen over there now.
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Happy birthday to fluuuuu
One year. Wow. One year since one of our best selling books came out. Read its story here. And thanks, Wayne, for being a brilliant author to work with.